SHE'S just been announced as the new Doctor Who, but this week Jodie Whittaker plays another kind of doctor entirely…

After her poignant portrayal of bereaved mum Beth Latimer in Broadchurch, it’s clear to see that Jodie Whittaker is an excellent actress. But it’s not just on screen that Jodie can put in a stellar performance.

When we met her almost eight weeks ago at an interview to publicise her next role, in BBC’s thriller Trust Me, she insisted she had no work lined up.

“I’m not doing anything!” said Jodie, 35. “I am having a very lovely summer. Obviously, I’ve worked for the last year solidly, so I’ve taken a well-earned couple of months.

“I am auditioning, too, so it’s not like I’m not working; it’s just that I don’t know what my next job is.”

A month after our chat, Jodie was announced as the new Time Lord in Doctor Who – one of the world’s most iconic TV roles – making her the first female to have won the part.

It’s momentous news, not just for Jodie but for British TV history, and if she knew about it when we met, she gave absolutely no clue.

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The keeping of secrets is certainly relevant to Jodie’s next role, in which she pretends to be a doctor of the more usual sort.

In Trust Me, Jodie stars as Cath Hardacre, who, after being suspended from her nurse’s job for whistle-blowing, and desperate to earn money, fakes being an A&E doctor.

It’s written by Dan Sefton, a practising A&E doctor who also writes ITV medical drama The Good Karma Hospital. Apparently, Dan’s research uncovered the information that imposter doctors are not as uncommon as you might imagine, a fact that Jodie naturally finds frightening.

“It was a total surprise to me!” she chuckles. “I said to Dan, ‘This is a drama and it’s not common, right?’ and then Dan goes, ‘It’s really common.’”

Dan explains that his research has shown a split between the genders when they pose as fake doctors.

In his opinion, men tend to do it for the glory of putting on a performance, while women fake it, “as a way of getting on in life,” he says.

“The best example is of James Barry, a Victorian woman who pretended to be a man all her life just so she could become a doctor.”

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Jodie will be the first female Doctor Who in British TV history

Trust Me tells the story of a modern woman who does this reckless thing, but for the right reasons. Cath is suspended unfairly from her NHS nurse’s job in Sheffield after blowing the whistle on dodgy practice in her hospital.

Wondering what to do next, on a whim she steals the identity of her best mate, senior doctor Ally (DCI Banks’ Andrea Lowe), who’s emigrating to Australia.

Cath moves to Edinburgh with her young daughter, pretends to be Ally and secures a job as an A&E doctor. There she must fool her colleagues, Dr Andy Brenner (The Paradise’s Emun Elliott) and Dr Brigitte Rayne (Mistresses’ Sharon Small), that she’s a proper doctor who can work on any emergency case wheeled into the A&E.

With a laugh, Jodie says it wasn’t all that hard to pretend being a fake doctor, given that Cath was expected to look uncertain as she tended to patients.

In the story, however, Cath teaches herself how to do certain techniques like stitching up patients and putting in chest tubes, which required Jodie to master tricky techniques.

Jodie Whittaker: The first female Doctor Who in pictures

Thu, November 9, 2017

Jodie Whittaker: The first female Doctor Who in pictures.

“We all had a different way of approaching our technical moment, and mine was very much, ‘Right, we’re not going forward until I get this right,’” explains Jodie. “I needed to be shown exactly what I’m doing.

We know the lines and how to do the emotions, but the bit we can’t blag is the technical stuff.”

Like a real medical student, she practised stitches endlessly. “I was just sat all morning on this piece of flesh,” continues Jodie. “It’s prosthetic and you can’t practise on it too many times or it gets too full of holes.

Stuff like that was nerve-wracking, particularly because on the page it’s a tiny bit and you’re sat there for four hours practising your stitches!”

Jodie says Dan recommended she watch Channel 4’s docu-series 24 Hours In A&E, too. “It can go from something really dramatic, like someone flown in on an ambulance, to someone with a twisted knee and a kid who swallowed a penny,” says Jodie.

“And the thing you notice the most is that no one is running around going ‘Give me this! Go go go!’ Everybody knows what they’re doing; it’s quite calm.”

Although on the outside Cath is calm, too, on the inside she’s a bundle of nerves. It might be the same for Jodie in the next few months, as she deals with the global fame that will follow her appearance, at Christmas, as the Doctor.

Before now, Jodie’s most prominent role was in Broadchurch, although she has worked solidly since earning rave reviews for her feature film debut in Venus (2006). She was also in Return To Cranford (2009), Sky’s short-lived The Smoke (2014) and a 2014 American series, The Assets.

“I’ve tried to not take the same job twice,” says Huddersfield-born Jodie, who’s married to American actor Christian Contreras, with whom she has a two-year-old daughter.

“It’s hard, because people know you for a certain thing, and it’s just always finding the thing that makes it difficult and interesting.

“I’ve been lucky, because the jobs I’ve done have been really hard and that’s what you want,” she says. It’s safe to say that in tackling roles as a fake doctor and a Time Lord, Jodie’s got the challenges she’s after.